


The God Abandons Antony

by freddieofhearts, nastally



Category: Queen (Band)
Genre: Angst, Cheating, Internalized Homophobia, Introspection, Loneliness, M/M, POV Multiple, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:53:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26292190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freddieofhearts/pseuds/freddieofhearts, https://archiveofourown.org/users/nastally/pseuds/nastally
Summary: America, the once-promised, the once, too soon, snatched from his grasp. Of course he hasn’t got over it! He, who never gets over anything.The late 70s, and Queen’s touring America again. For Freddie Mercury, there are... some ups and downs to being on the road.
Relationships: Brian May/Chrissie Mullen, Dominique Beyrand/Roger Taylor, Freddie Mercury/David Minns, Joe Fanelli/Freddie Mercury, John Deacon/Veronica Tetzlaff
Comments: 115
Kudos: 54





	The God Abandons Antony

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to this collab, we sincerely hope you enjoy reading it as much as we are enjoying writing it. 
> 
> Happy Birthday, Freddie. 💕

_1977_

-

A shock of impenetrable American vastness. And he’s foreign, again, alien –

Freddie wants this. Wants it this time as he did the last: to breathe easier, and to leave certain expectations behind him. Leave India, leave Zanzibar, leave England; leave Farrokh Bulsara far behind and create himself anew. A thousand miles, and then a thousand more. 

Isn’t that what America’s all about? The New World, as they called it once, a name almost too tantalising to be real—and he should know something about that. The poseur in chief. That, he sometimes thinks, on bitterly cold nights, is his only real talent. 

America, the once-promised, the once, too soon, snatched from his grasp. Of course he hasn’t got over it! He, who never gets over anything.

If anyone needs a fresh start… he thinks, nauseous on the plane, his head on Roger’s shoulder. The windows are misted with the breath of strangers, and his stomach lurches. Week after week of this, the horror. 

He has seen many mountains, many plains. And yet he hasn’t lost the taste for scenery, because if you have a good eye—Oh, then it’s _always_ with you, darling, that never goes. I shall be ninety-five goggling at Mont Blanc, I promise!

The wide open spaces. At this time of year, he’s spared the amber waves of grain. 

Milwaukee. 

Indianapolis. 

Oh, he can be a bloody little slag anywhere, too right. He’ll find somewhere to go, someone to play with: a big fat man with a big fat dick. 

David’s not to blame; I was made like this. 

Paul opens the car door for him as if everything was decided a long time ago.

Welcome, welcome to America!

-

Mr Mercury soars, star-bright and fast as a firework. No one to hold him back, hold him down, and no one to hurt him.

No one to _hold_ him. 

He’s laughing up at Roger, open-mouthed on the stage, his throat is sore but it’s nothing, nothing. The life he dared not dream of—or only as if wrapped in fever and held down by matron, and a hypodermic needle slipped into the baby flesh of the left arm. 

All such dreams, long ago. 

His stage glows, and he’ll share it: of course he will, he loves them. Together they burn. Half drunk, half decent, clothes like molten silver, like cobweb about to catch. Oh no, Titania, she’ll go up like a Roman Candle! 

_Oh Mother Mercury, look what they’ve done to me._

Lovely, how the old songs spark up in the blackness of a mind waiting, surging, in the half-dark, about to run onto the stage. 

Fifty thousand times more alive when he kneels at Brian’s feet, his lips opening—to kiss and to suck, to scream and to sing. No need to practise any longer, he’s word perfect: the verbs of a man who will live forever. He is already lost, but planetary, indefatigable, carried by a force he can’t ever explain to the front of the stage, to the back, to Roger, to John, and back to Brian again. 

_My pole star. My steady north._

Sometimes it’s flawless: hairspray and kohl, the line slicked under an eye. Caffeine, little enough sleep, and giddy, giddy—a man’s arm always catching you. 

Roses and clean knickers and reeking sweat, Roger’s hands are bleeding but he doesn’t give a damn. 

Beer soft in the mouth. Girls crying, little girls who look happy underneath their tears. Blurred-out mouths, bright-coloured shorts. 

Steam filling the room, euphoria, how John claps and beats his hand against his denim thigh. 

They’re happy. Aren’t they happy? 

Paul wraps the yellow dressing gown around him. Towelling, precise care. It is almost love. He isn't lonely, now. 

_Fred, you cheeky bastard,_ someone else says, and he blows a kiss into the air, up high.

-

_He’s a fag, that one, yeah. Cocksucker. The singer, yeah, the faggot._

It’s never the same, when Freddie’s up there. 

He holds a sightless whip, so that like a circus man he can command them—or usually he can, although there are, and he hates to admit it, bad nights. Touring, oh God, the journeys and all that comes with them, aching eyes and nausea, stale breath, sore knees, the ghastly air hurting his throat, putting the frighteners on him. He knows—if he knows anything at all—what it’s like to let people down. 

The dear press, swooping in like vultures. 

There is no mercy. Drawing blood, they bay for more. 

_What’s a little singing birdie to do, my angels?_

Roger’s awkward chuckle. He knows a lie when it’s made its home in Freddie’s mouth, grown too comfortable there.

And their nights burn out like candles. 

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” Brian says with solemnity one late, purpled winter morning. In Freddie’s suite, they’re catching up on some especially unpleasant remarks—guiltily, because no one wants them to see such tawdry shit, and their slippery Freddie, their eater of hearts, can bear it least of all. 

He sits over the strewn papers shivering and fretting. Of course this tea is disgusting, scarcely even drinkable. Silted with Americana, the water from god-knows-where and the milk vile. His palate throbs and he has two mouth ulcers, bloody undignified things. Roger’s lip-smacking is unbearably irritating. 

Too much, all of it. 

The newsprint on the page blurs. Oh, how they love to hate him. Freddie takes another sip of his lukewarm dishwater tea, tries to steady the cup in his hand. 

There’s always one man who falters most, and to be him is not easy.

-

Brutal hangovers follow nights of excess—they do get worse, with age. Freddie has been blessed by some deity of the vine and suffers the least, but even he doesn’t escape entirely. It’s comical when he thinks of how he used to abstain. That pure little boy, nursing one beer all evening.

He’s worked hard at it. 

You need to _take part_. 

Is it only drinking more, or being not quite as young, that turns the screw? He wouldn’t like to say, although he witnesses the torments of the others at sufficiently close quarters to have formed some conclusions. Discretion being the better part of valour, he keeps them to himself, and everyone is accordingly kind to him when he is among the afflicted. If they’re sprawled on the tour bus and suffering mostly in silence, someone will put an arm around him without being asked. 

He needs the warmth, if he’s to sleep at all; his feet are always like blocks of ice, if he isn’t wriggling about. Move, they scream, or die. 

When nobody sleeps, there is company. Trivial Pursuit, Scrabble, bad jokes and good conversation. Or more often still the classic and convivial time-waster known as a fine old grumbling. It might as well be five years ago—they might be, almost, in a rickety van weaving all over the pollen-soaked road. The way down to Cornwall, driving right into the sky. Or up North, into England’s freeze-your-bollocks-off endlessness.

No wives to worry about. 

No money, though Freddie’s the last person to look back on that with silly fondness –

Only one another, squeezed together in kind or ill tempers, gentle and snappish by turns, bringing with them sundry colds in the head, dog-eared notebooks, Polo mints, very cheap booze, and Freddie’s rouge—which nobody else takes care of properly, and it drives him wild. 

One another. Much fear, and more disappointment. The horrible acoustics, that man in the front row—and yet, it was easier, because it must have been. It can’t have been like this, with the endless road unfurling like a pilgrimage … No, no, we won’t reach anything, _that isn’t the point_ , Fred. 

He feels the loss of that togetherness, as gradual as the turning tide. Waves at first barely noticed, a suspicion only. How those waves grow in strength as the change swells, drawn by the magnetic pull of the unseen; it’s natural, after all.

 _Begin, and cease, and then again begin._

You know this one. Pebbles on the shores of England, things that belong, first and last—as man and woman belong together. In every holy book, in every fairy story. 

John has a family. John is a father, not a child. 

If Brian becomes a father too, if he and Chrissy—they’re thinking about it, and he and John gossip quietly in the darkened tour bus, talking only to each other. 

“Of course it is, Bri. It's hard on both of us. All three of us.” 

He’s the seasoned expert, turning his can of lager slowly on the table. The words sound ordinary in his mouth. If Freddie said that, it would be a scream, everyone would laugh—and probably he shouldn’t listen now, but he does. His knees are drawn up to his chest and he’s looking out of the window, but there’s only a bank of dark grey cloud, no moon at all.

“You miss out—well, course you do,” John says. “They grow up fast, like the saying, and it’s true. It’s true, that.” 

“I think that’s,” Brian’s voice, full of pre-emptive sadness—“That’s what worries me most, you know.” He leans towards John, as if that alone might help him. “I mean, you walk in like a stranger, it's already… it's like that, isn't it? When you've been gone for a long time. There's a disconnect, and I can't imagine–”

And to sit among your friends, Freddie thinks, to become a stranger here? 

John sighs. "You get used to it. And anyway, it's hard for you, but it's harder for them and that's something to keep in mind.” There's a silence, as though he's said more than he would have liked, and so he pulls it back, makes light of it. “It's not all about you, let me tell you. Once you have children nothing ever is!” 

But there is a dryness, a bitterness in the chuckle that follows. Brian chuckles, too, and they both sip their beers. Freddie closes his eyes, leans his head against the vibrating, cold glass. 

Suddenly or slowly, they will leave the stage, and go home to their children. These children are perhaps born, perhaps unborn, but that is immaterial: they matter more. They matter most. 

_With tremulous cadence slow_... Even thus, my dears, certain as the tide, you leave me.

-

The inside of his throat feels raw as the month, scoured out with salt and wet and cold. How are there still such bells in this newer world? How are these sparkling peals thrown into the evening air for free? America usually implies a cacophony of traffic, and Freddie’s growing accustomed to it—but not to this, not to such a signal prancing its way into the icy dark, making this seem a strange between-place, neither America nor Europe.

He's sure it isn’t late in the evening, not really… 

“It’s normal, don’t fuss…”

Paul, miraculously guessing the question: Why is it so dark? This bewilders me, and I am at least slightly unnerved.

He can be an impatient man, but then what else can you expect from a prophet? Even that, in its way, reassures you if you take it as Paul must mean it: Freddie, silly fool, why worry so? Let me steer you into the lift, we have a room to get to. Are the others dithering like this? Would they ever behave so?

Of course not. 

Three sturdy backs are disappearing into the lobby, as if they have something to do that isn’t for Freddie to enquire after.

Fucking more girls, probably. 

(That isn’t fair, Roger would say he’s welcome. Whether he fucks someone or not. Only none of them, and Freddie quite understands this, wants to see him get fucked, or be anywhere near while that is happening. There are limits.)

Absurd, that’s what he is, because he feels close to tears all of a sudden. For God’s sake, Freddie—he smiles at Paul instead, the smile that has not an atom of Bulsara left in it. 

“I hate this staid sort of place,” he says. “Oh darling, please, please—take me out, I need to let my hair down! Trixie, you can’t _imagine_.” 

“I think I can.”

“You can’t, dear, truly.” 

He is sure of that: people who think they catch the meaning are the furthest off, nearly every time.

-

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a reference to [this poem of the same name.](https://www.nationalpoetrylibrary.org.uk/online-poetry/poems/god-abandons-antony)


End file.
